


Finders, Keepers

by Leviathan0999



Category: James Bond - Ian Fleming
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-14
Updated: 2018-04-14
Packaged: 2019-04-22 21:15:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14317287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leviathan0999/pseuds/Leviathan0999
Summary: James Bond and Felix Leiter reminisce about a case in Berlin, in 1986





	Finders, Keepers

            When James Bond stepped off the 747 at Logan International Airport, Felix Leiter was there to meet him with a cheerful smirk and a wave of his plastic right hand.

            "Hullo, James. How's the Import-Export biz?" 

            Bond shook his head at his old friend. Since retiring from the CIA, Felix had had great fun lampooning what he liked to call "the spy game." He was as willing as ever, of course, to jump in and help out -- but always with an arch sense of mockery. "Silly enough game," he'd told Bond more than once, "for grown men to be playing." 

            Bond returned the smile and shook hands with his old friend. He looked down at their hands, the warmth of their clasp contrasting in Bond's mind with the cool plastic of Leiter's prosthetic hand. 

            Leiter walked Bond back toward the security gate, and with a nod to the customs agent and a jerk of his head toward Bond, they were free of the desk and on their way into a back hallway to the baggage handling area. 

            They were met there by a smiling, balding olive-skinned man, who spoke with a soft latin accent, Portuguese, perhaps, or maybe Brazilian. "Felix," he said, pointing at the scuffed brown suitcase that had been Bond's traveling companion for more years than he cared to count, "Is this the one you meant?" 

            "Sure is, Gus," he said. " _Gracias, amigo._ " 

            Bond smiled and nodded, and stepped forward to take the suitcase, but Leiter angled him away from it. "Forget _that_ , Jack," he said, a little sharply under his overtly bantering tone. "I'll worry about the bag. You worry about your briefcase. If you juggle 'em, you're likely to drop one, and set off the tear-gas!" 

            He reached down with his artificial right hand, and grabbed the suitcase's handle. Bond was surprised by the ease and quickness with which he picked up the heavy bag. Leiter caught his raised eyebrow and grinned. "You'd be amazed at the advances in prosthetics, James. I'm almost the Six Million Dollar Man, these days!" 

            He clapped Gus on the shoulder. "Seeya Later, Gus!" 

            Gus smiled. "So long, Felix. Nice to meet you, Mr. Boldman." 

            Bond nodded. "And you, Gus." 

            They shook hands, and Felix led Bond onward, down another back hallway. Bond leaned toward him, and muttered, "I'm sure Gus enjoyed that joke about the tear-gas." 

            Felix ran his flesh-and-blood left hand through his still-sandy blond hair. "I'm pretty sure Agent Flores isn't a security risk, Mister Nought-Nought-Seven, sir." 

            "Agent Flores?" 

            "Augusto Flores. DEA." They walked through an unpainted metal door into the late-afternoon sunshine of an employee car-park. "Working a smuggling case. Expect to see his boss on the news tomorrow, announcing a massive bust of airline baggage-handlers and flight-crews." 

            "I take it you know him from your time with the DEA?" 

            "Naw," Felix laughed. "Just met him a couple of hours ago. He was just one of the baggage handlers who helped me arrange to pull your stuff, but I recognized the `look,' if you know what I mean." 

            Bond did indeed. There was a kind of hardness, an alertness around the eyes, that law enforcement people tended to develop. Bond hadn't seen it in Flores, but that did't mean Felix hadn't. For all his corn-pone Texan charm, Leiter was a sharp man, and as hard as anyone could need him to be. 

            Felix led Bond to a cream-colored 1986 Cadillac Seville, a singularly unattractive car with a trunk that had been chopped-off in a vain attempt to recall the look of the rear end of a Rolls Royce. The slanting rays of the afternoon sun painted the driver's side with a vivid golden glow, but even that couldn't rescue the car from its aesthetic deficiencies. Bond raised an eyebrow at Felix. 

            "Ugly as sin, isn't it?" said Leiter with a smile. He reached into his pocket, and the doors unlocked with a solid "thunk!" but without the usual bleat of alarms. Bond approved; cars ought not to cry out for attention -- especially when the drivers were in his and Leiter's line of work. "Well," said Felix, as he opened the back door and tossed Bond's suitcase on the seat. "Its original engine was a big ol' V-8, and that rattled around under the hood like a pea in the Astrodome. It just didn't seem right, wasting all that space, so I took it out and put in a custom-built racing V-12. Off-the-rack these bad boys could do 120 easy. I've had this one at 165." He smiled as he opened the passenger door for Bond. "It's not an ejector seat, but it'll do." 

            Bond handed his briefcase to Leiter, and climbed into the car, roomy and luxuriously appointed. The seats were real leather, in a tasteful light brown, and immaculately cared for. 

            Leiter tossed the briefcase in back, on top of the suitcase, and Bond laughed. "Careful of the tear-gas, Felix!" 

            Felix grinned as he rounded the car and climbed in behind the wheel, and Bond watched with a certain impressed regard as Leiter grabbed the gear-shift with his artificial hand. As always where the prosthesis was concerned, Leiter noticed his friend's look, and as usual, dismissed it with a grin. 

            "I told you, James. These days, I'm practically bionic! Here, look at this." Leiter pushed up his sleeve past the seam that marked the top end of his prosthesis, and grabbed the wrist firmly in his left hand. A twist and a pull, and he had separated it from the stump of his forearm, and he gestured that stump toward Bond. There was a smooth, burnished steel knob protruding from his flesh, and a series of small wires leading from the false hand into what looked to be small cuts in the stump. 

            "See those wires? They plug into little sockets under these flaps" -- Leiter casually opened one of the "cuts" with a thumb and forefinger, revealing a prosaic plug-and-socket affair that would have looked at home on a personal stereo. -- "and those sockets are actually wired into the nerves of my arm. Some of 'em carry commands to the prosthesis. Some of 'em actually carry feedback from sensor pads built into this thing." He waved the stump of the prosthetic hand. Bond found the gesture both amusing and disturbing. "I can actually _feel_ now, after a fashion. And the knob plugs right into a receptacle in the prosthetic, for a good, strong connection. I can lift more with this one than the real one, and this one never gets tired." 

            Felix plugged the steel knob protruding from his arm into the prosthetic, and twisted it into place. 

            "The thing is a goddamned miracle, James." Leiter rolled his sleeve back down again, and calmly started the car. "Don't get me wrong," he said, shifting smoothly into reverse with the artificial hand, "I can't pull dimes out of my pocket with it, or anything as grandiose as that, but it's a goddamned miracle nonetheless." 

            He shifted back into gear, and they were off. 

            As they entered the sheltered darkness of the Sumner Tunnel, Bond turned to Felix. "So what's this all about, anyway? What's in Boston that I absolutely need to see?" 

            "Well," said Felix, steering expertly amongst the cars, and gaining considerably on traffic as they came out of the tunnel, "There's the State House, there's Fanuel Hall, the Bunker Hill monument \- all sorts of memorabilia connected to giving you limey bastards what for -- the New England Aquarium is quite nice-" 

            "Felix!" cried Bond, and his friend relented. Bond, as it has been stated before, treasured his few men friends, and none more than Felix Leiter. It was not just common adventures shared down the years, but Leiter's indomitable spirit, his ability to hold his smiling head up, no matter what blows life dealt him. 

            "All right, all right," said Felix. "It's not in Boston. We're headed west, into the middle of nowhere, Massachusetts." He paused for a moment, expertly merging into traffic on a fair-sized motorway advertised by signs as the "Mass Pike." 

            Leiter swore cheerfully at a mini-van, swung around it, and into the left lane, and lowered his foot on the gas. 

            "Remember about fifteen years ago," he said, "when we didn't win the Cold War?" 

            Bond smiled sheepishly at the memory. "Well, we didn't lose it, either." 

            "Not for lack of trying," said Felix. "The West may have won the Cold War, but no thanks to us. Not on that caper, anyway." 

            Bond shook his head, and glanced involuntarily skyward. "I can't argue with you, Felix. We botched that job." 

            Leiter grinned. "Listen, I want you to talk me through that case. As if you were reporting it to that old monster, M." 

            "What's the point of that?" Bond snapped, as Leiter slowed down and pulled through a toll-booth without stopping. "You know what happened as well as I do!" 

            Felix sighed. "Humor me, willya? Just on the off-chance I know what I'm doing." 

            "Oh, all right," said Bond, and thought back to the Spring of 1986. 

* * *

            "'Fraid our American cousins have let down the side again, 007," M told Bond, in the warm yellow light of his office. "Frightful mess. You know their President has been pushing this `Star Wars' program of his. Seems rather foolish, of course, but that's how it's meant to seem. The science behind it is quite serious stuff." 

            "I understand they've developed a prototype particle-beam weapon," said Bond. 

            "The Russians share your understanding. Poppycock, pure and simple. That sort of technology is decades off. But it keeps our Soviet friends busy enough, and that's a help. 

            "No, what the Americans have really been developing is something called `Thor.'" M shuffled through the papers on his red leather desktop, selected one. "Simple enough thing, really, but quite devastating. It's essentially a swarm of crowbars, believe it or not. Long, tapered bars of molybdenum steel, released into orbit. They've got a simple guidance system, and a modest computer system aboard. Nothing much. Just enough senses and enough sense to recognize a target, and fall on it." 

            "Seems an awful lot of trouble to go through to throw spears at tanks, sir," said Bond. 

            "Y'think so, eh?" said M, peevishly. "The energy they gain on the way down is such that they strike like pocket nukes. More powerful than anything used on the modern battlefield. They arrive at a speed many times the speed of sound. The released energy is largely in the form of heat and gamma rays, but even the shock wave is greater than the one that accompanied the detonation of the Hiroshima bomb." M held a photograph out to Bond. "This is a Bradley Tank they hit with a test drop." 

            The photograph showed an oddly-shaped hump of material with bits of metal -- gears and tread segments, part of what looked like a hatch -- protruding randomly from its lumpy surface. A long, curved pole protruded from near the top, arcing up and then down smoothly, to point toward the ground. Bond belatedly recognized it as the barrel of the tank's main gun. 

            "Tidy," said Bond, deeply impressed. 

            "Quite," M replied, showing his irritation at Bond's accustomed flippancy toward destruction. "It's cheap, it's easy, it's low-tech, and it's devastatingly effective. It could single-handedly turn the global balance of power forever." 

            He opened a wooden canister on his desk, and began loading his pipe with fresh tobacco. "Bloody shame the Americans have let it get stolen." 

            "Stolen!" Bond looked back up at M. "Surely if they've got working prototypes in Orbit-" 

            "That's very much the problem, I'm afraid, 007. There were six in orbit, all successfully used in tests. The Bradley you see there, a missile silo in Montana, an unmanned jumbo jet over Area 51, a mocked-up radar installation with full ECM aimed at it, in Nevada, a railroad bridge over the Snake River Canyon, and the _USS Airy Wave_ , which I gather was a decommissioned World War II destroyer. That must have been quite the sight to see. They say she folded up in the middle like so much clean laundry." M lit his pipe. In the dancing flames, his grey eyes showed a glint of red. "Then the Americans launched their second wave of prototypes." He puffed at his pipe for a moment. "Two hundred and fifty of them. 

            "Well, it seems our cousins practiced heavy security by making sure that all the engineering data for this thing, and all the control codes as well -- massively encrypted stuff, that -- were stored on a portable, removable computer hard-drive. A vast thing, capable of storing what the computer folk call a Gigabyte -- that's a thousand Megabytes, or a million bytes -- of information, in no more space than a good-sized hardcover book." He slapped the dictionary on his desk. 

            "That's extraordinary!" said Bond. He'd worked with some of the computers in the basement of the old grey building on Regent's Park, and knew that a Gigabyte was equal to nearly a thousand of the 8" computer disks he'd seen the technicians -- very few were actually "programmers," it turned out -- handling. Each of those held the equivalent amount of text to your average popular novel. 

            "Indeed," huffed M. "The idea is that this hard drive is removed from the computer, and locked away in a safe. 

            "Well, in this case, it was removed from the computer by the project's chief scientist, a fella named Novotny, and removed from the research complex in Utah. Novotny's disappeared with all the plans." He gestured skyward, contempt deepening the lines in his hardened sailor's face. "Now the Americans have no more means of controlling those bloody things than we do, and, unless we can stop Novotny, the Russians will." 

            "You mean Novotny's loyalties were still to Russia?" Bond asked. "The mole running for home?" 

            "Nothing of the sort, 007!" barked M. "Novotny's one-hundred-percent all-American. His loyalties are beyond question. He's loyal to the almighty dollar! We've intercepted a top-secret Kremlin cable. Novotny's selling the hard drive to the Kremlin for one million dollars." 

            "Do we know where the buy is supposed to take place?" 

            "Berlin," said M. "Right on the doorstep of Checkpoint Charlie, apparently. Exchanged via the usual Soviet `blind drop.' Nothing more specific than that, though. 

            "The CIA are sending a man out. Seems they want to make sure it goes right, because they've called one of their old veterans out of retirement. Your old friend Leiter. When we expressed an interest in having one of our own join in on the hunt, he requested you. I didn't see the harm in it, so you're in." 

            M puffed at his pipe for a moment. "If the Russians get their hands on Thor, James, the world will be a very different -- very ugly -- place. The Soviet's empire is crumbling underneath them. Thor might not be enough to prop that empire up but they've nothing to lose, either, and the thing's cheap enough that they are certain to use it. That can't be allowed to happen. You have to get Thor back." 

* * *

            Felix looked measuringly at Bond as he pulled, without slowing, through another tollbooth, and moved swiftly along a curving ramp, leaving the turnpike behind for a highway called "Route 495." Bond had heard of it, in fact: Route 495 was a roughly semicircular highway allowing drivers on the main Artery of the American East Coast -- the infamous "I-95" which stretches from Maine to Florida -- to bypass the sprawl of Boston proper, at a distance of some 30 miles from the city itself. It was gaining fame as a high-tech highway, as the mass of software and internet firms that had made Boston's nearer bypass road, Route 128, a second Silicon Valley expanded westward. Bond was beginning to make a connection. Was there a connection to the Thor affair amongst those technological giants? 

            "Didn't your boss want you to get Thor for Jolly Olde Englande?" Felix chuckled. "He always struck me as thinking that all the rest of us were foreigners." 

            Bond only smiled. 

            "Anyway," said Leiter, "You seemed a bit cagey when you were getting off the plane in Berlin." 

* * *

            Well, that had been true enough. M had _not_ , in fact, instructed Bond to try to get Thor for Queen and Country, but Bond had been left with the clear impression that the old man wanted just that. He'd mulled it over all the while aboard the British Airways Airbus that carried him from Gatwick. In the end, as the jet angled down to Tempelhof, with its oval road around the runways and distinctive, eagle-shaped terminal, he decided to wait and see what happened. There was no point in concerning himself with possibilities that were as yet outside his control. When Thor \- or at least that damnable computer drive -- was in his hands, he could decide whether to hand it to Felix. Until then, the question was moot. 

            He'd driven Leiter on that occasion, in a Rented Saab 900 Turbo not too different from his own, through the crowded, busy, cosmopolitan streets of West Berlin. 

            "The Germans say their National Bird is the Crane," said Bond, gesturing out the window at one of the hundreds of construction sites in the city. A crane there swung a large metal ball at the still-standing remains of one wall of a factory. A single smokestack pointed like an accusing finger at the clouds, its top already crumbled into a ragged, torn fingernail. Across the way, another titanic crane was using a huge electromagnet to lift a steel beam to the rooftop of the partially-completed expansion of a broadcasting center. A metal spire reached skyward, encrusted with barnacles of microwave dishes. A large satellite dish looked skyward from the roof, partially obscured behind green illuminated letters that read "F.A.B." 

            Bond swung the Saab through the traffic with practiced ease. Drive in Germany once, and you're ready to do it for the rest of your life. The Germans drove with a meticulous precision and enormous speed that spoke of perfect coordination with one another. The whole nation was like a vast machine, operating smoothly and synchronously, and its people were not so much citizens as components. Bond had wondered at it before, and had in the process become convinced that it was a key to the culture, a great strength of these people, but also, when a Hitler came on the scene, their downfall. 

            Soon they were approaching the candy-striped barriers and low, off-white buildings of Checkpoint Charlie. To their right, the flat, windowless wall of a building announced, in faded letters, _"Neue Zeit"_ \-- "New Time." Bond wondered whether a new time would indeed come for this fractured nation and its crisp, efficient people. He wasn't sure whether it would, and wasn't sure whether he hoped it would. 

            Bond pulled to a stop at the first barrier, and one of the checkpoint guards approached the car. He was a Marine corporal, a hulking black man with surprisingly gentle features, his left eyelid drooping sleepily over the eye. 

            Leiter leaned over and held his I.D. out to the guard, who looked it over briefly and handed it back. "Good to see you, Mr. Leiter," he said, his deep voice as gentle as his face. "And you'd be Mr. Bond?" Bond nodded. The guard gestured to one side. "I'm Corporal Lansing. Just park over there, and I'll bring you to Mr. Perlin's office. He's expecting you." 

            Bond parked where he was directed, and he and Leiter stepped back over to Lansing. 

            "Right this way," said Lansing, and they were off. Lansing paused to pick up a discarded candy wrapper from the pavement between two cars. "People are such slobs," he told them, with a smile. "There's a trashcan right here by the door." He dropped the wrapper into the dustbin, and led them into one of the off-white huts that were the only buildings in the historic crossing point between freedom and the grey repression of the Soviet Bloc. 

            The corporal led them through a door into a smallish supply-room, and pushed the side of a large metal Dumpster. It rolled smoothly on a recessed track, to reveal a clean, well-lit flight of stairs leading down below ground level. There they walked through a series of institutional-green corridors, lit by bright florescent lights, to an unremarkable paneled door, on which Lansing rapped twice. 

            "Come!" called a gravelly voice, and Lansing opened the door and led them in. 

            The office was roomy enough, given their underground location, with a desk at one end and a few chairs and a small table in the middle. Behind the desk was a smallish man in civilian attire. He was in his mid-to-late 50's, with dark, greying hair, and a face lined and weary, but a brightness and humor in his dark-grey eyes. 

            "Felix, good to see you," he said, rounding the desk. "And I expect you're Commander Bond?" The dark-haired man shook both their hands. "I'm Bill Perlin, CIA station chief. Good to meet you." He clapped a hand on Lansing's shoulder. "Thanks, Dave, I think we're all set." 

            The corporal nodded, and smiled again at Bond and Leiter. "A pleasure to meet you, Gentlemen," he said, and stepped back into the corridor, closing the door behind him. 

            Perlin nodded toward the door. "Dave Lansing's a good man. I hope the U.S. Marines can keep him." He waved them to the chairs. "Here, have a seat, and let me know how we can help you." 

            "Well, it's fairly straightforward," said Felix Leiter. "You've got the file?" 

            Perlin nodded. 

            "Well, any help you can give us in keeping an eye out for Novotny can only help. The Russians are going to be leaving the money for him somewhere nearby in a typical blind drop. Some random-looking rubbish-bag will contain a million dollars US, and Novotny will know where and when to go and pick it up. Then he'll plant the hard-drive in a similar manner for his Soviet contact to pick up and bring home to Mother Russia. The SIGINT we got didn't tell us where Novotny is or will be before or after the drop. Only that the cash drop was arranged based on coded co-ordinates centered on Checkpoint Charlie. Our cypher boys haven't successfully cracked the co-ordinates yet. They expect to sometime next week, though!" 

            Perlin laughed at that. "Cheops' Law in action. No mistaking this for anything but a Government operation. We've distributed Novotny's picture to the guards with orders to detain on sight. They don't know why, of course. No need to share little details like that with the men. Probably think it's a drug operation." 

            "That's fine with us," said Felix, and Bond nodded. 

            "Should be easy enough to spot," said Perlin, gesturing at the photo of Novotny that was paper-clipped to the file. The photograph showed a man with long, dark hair, curling down around the sides of his face, and a rich, full beard. "That's a recent photo, and he still looks like a Jesus freak from 1969." 

            Bond shook his head with a half-smile. "The trouble with using hair and beards and the like as an identifier is that they come off relatively easily." He looked again at the photograph of Novotny, his gently-smiling lips and clever, sardonic eyes seeming to laugh at Bond. "Look instead at the shape of the nose -- see how long and fine it is? - and the mouth and -- to a lesser extent -- the eyes. Those are the harder to change." 

            Perlin shrugged. "This isn't a trained operative, Commander Bond." he said. "In my experience, people outside the field don't change their whole appearance." 

            "He's well-motivated," replied Bond. 

            Perlin smiled."In any case, is there any more we here can do for you?" 

            Leiter smiled. "All we can do is start wearing down our shoe-leather. You know how to get in touch with us if you get any updates, right?" 

            "You bet," said Perlin. "You'll be hearing from us before the phone stops ringing." 

* * *

            Berlin has long had a reputation as being one of the most sophisticated, cosmopolitan -- and decadent -- cities in the world. The streets around Checkpoint Charlie were filled with throngs representing all of what was right and wrong with modern urban culture: strutting, teenagers in full punk regalia, triumphing in every eyebrow they raised; staid, suited, briefcase-carrying businessmen and women marching from bank to brokerage; streetwalkers, tourists, soldiers, vendors, and amongst them, Bond and Leiter, seeming to wander at random, looking searchingly into the eyes and mouths of men on all sides. 

            "Too much more of this," said Leiter with a wry half-smile, "And we're going to be invited to a nice gay bar." 

            They'd been searching for two hours, with no results, staring at bald men and hairy men and men in suits and men in workmen's cover-alls and men with beards and men with mustaches and men with clean faces. 

            Bond agreed. "We're getting nowhere. It's time to start using our brains instead of just our eyes." 

            "What have you got in mind?" 

            "Look. Until two days ago, he was living in Utah. Now he's here in Berlin. That's, what, 9 hours time difference? It's 3:30 here, but for Novotny, it's six-thirty in the morning." 

            Leiter nodded. "I think I see where you're going with this." 

            They looked at each other. "Breakfast," they said, in unison, and Bond continued, "Let's see how many middle-aged men can we find who are having breakfast." 

* * *

            Leiter looked over at Bond as he pulled the Cadillac off of the Massachusetts highway onto a secondary road marked "Route 62" and headed west. "I still say it made more sense than trying to find him walking the _strassen_ around Checkpoint Charlie," he told Bond. 

            "Well," said Bond, "I don't know about your boss, but mine was interested in results. Those were pretty thin on the ground." 

            "Can't argue with that," replied Felix Leiter. 

* * *

            Middle-aged American tourists weren't particularly thin on the ground, however. As Bond and Leiter canvassed hotels and restaurants and cafés, studying plates and then faces, they saw eggs and bacon and pancakes -- "flapjacks," Leiter called them -- and waffles and cereals, hot and cold, being eaten by men and women and children... But none with the long, fine nose or humorous eyes that marked Novotny. 

            By eight o'clock, they were re-thinking their strategy when Leiter's pocket-pager beeped plaintively for his attention. "Coming, Mother," he murmured, pulling it from his pocket and glancing at the readout. His face became serious. "Back to Perlin's office, James," he said. "Something's hit the fan." 

            Lansing met them, looking particularly grim, and led them down again to Perlin's office. Perlin, closing the door swiftly behind the departing Lansing, wasted no time getting to the point. "We've pulled in some new SIGINT. There's been some sort of SNAFU. Accusations flying back and forth between Moscow and Novotny. He's claiming they didn't leave him the money. They're accusing him of trying to hold them up for more. The air's thick with signals. We're pulling 'em off of a Soviet bird. Can't locate the sources, I'm afraid." 

            He turned, and looked at Bond. "Your boss asked that you call him." 

* * *

            M demanded Bond's report without preamble, and interrupted it near the end. "What you're telling me, 007, is that, while your target was standing in front of Checkpoint Charlie, agitatedly checking rubbish-bags, you and Mr. Leiter were busy at the International House of Pancakes, watching aging Americans complain about the paucity of `real maple syrup!'" 

            "Well, sir," Bond replied, "It seemed a reasonable-" 

            "I'm sure that, when Redland is deploying Thor, 007, we'll all sleep better in our beds knowing you let it slip through our fingers because it seemed reasonable at the time!" 

* * *

            The hours that followed were tense ones, as recriminations flew through the air between Moscow and Novotny. Moscow accused Novotny of not having Thor. Novotny's reply was quite reasonable, asking where the Kremlin wanted to see it demonstrated. Moscow replied that they were not interested in Novotny's braggadocio. 

            "Oh," said Perlin, reading the transcript of that exchange. "I do _not_ feel good about this." 

            Perlin's foreboding was justified. By Eleven o'clock, he had delivered to him a news bulletin, and a new batch of transcripts. He read them over, looking grim, and looked to Bond and Leiter. 

            "The sonofabitch has done it," he said, quietly. "SATINT shows that a decommissioned Soviet battleship, the _Tsiolkovsky_ , sitting in mothballs at Vladivostok, suddenly experienced a highly energetic, highly localized explosion amidships. She broke in two, and went down - as far as possible in that harbor -- in a space of about ten minutes. Now the Russkis are offering Novotny _two_ million. Novotny has said he wants it, cash in hand, by five tomorrow morning. Moscow's falling all over themselves to agree." 

            Leiter smiled grimly. "I'll bet they are. That gives us the break we need. We've got six hours." 

            "But we won't need them," Bond said, quickly. "We've been assuming that Novotny's signals are being relayed to the Soviet satellite, and that he could be anywhere, using commercial communications \- telephone, short wave, what-have-you." 

            "Right," said Leiter. 

            "I guarantee he isn't controlling Thor from a phone booth!" Bond stood. "He's somewhere with computers and a satellite uplink." 

* * *

            " **BERLIN** " 

            Bond was jarred from his reverie by the word, carved on the front of a newish building seen past Felix Leiter's profile, outside the window of his Cadillac. Below, in smaller letters, were the words " _Town Offices_." The sky had darkened into a soft pastel purple, and long shadows fell from the pines and maples onto the unselfconsciously picturesque New England architecture. This Berlin had the unmistakable air of a town that had seen better days, but for all that it was charming, and quite beautiful. 

            "What the hell, Felix?" asked Bond. "Berlin?" 

            "I thought you'd noticed that when we turned off the highway," Leiter replied. "I thought it was getting on towards time to eat, and you know how I like to find new places. I saw the name of this town on the exit sign, and since we were talking about that Thor Fiasco, I thought, `What the hell?'" 

            The tiny collection of buildings that constituted "downtown" had disappeared behind them, without a restaurant in sight, and Felix sighed, looking around for a suitable side street. The Cadillac rattled over a railroad crossing, and Felix turned right immediately thereafter, and drove on up this road, parallel to the tracks. Bond knew that Felix was looking for a parallel road to return to the highway. Like all secret agents, he disliked doubling back over his own course, giving someone an extra chance to see him, remember him, identify him. 

            Suddenly Leiter braked, and pulled toward the side of the road, pointing ahead of him. 

            "For God's sake!" he exclaimed. "Would you look at that!" 

            Bond followed the pointing finger and found himself looking at a long, low, off-white building, sitting at an intersection, its back close by the railroad tracks. A sign atop the building, in military-stencil style lettering, read: 

CHECKPOINT CHARLIE 

Nightclub 

Fine Dining, Fine Spirits, Live Entertainment

            The red-and-white striped barricades raised where the side street crossed the tracks stood in nicely for those -- so damnably fresh in James Bond's memory -- beside which he and Felix Leiter had spent such a frustrating two days, fifteen years before. Over the entrance to the car-park was another sign: "You Are Now Leaving The American Sector." 

            "Good Grief," said Bond. He looked for a long moment at Leiter, who shook his head slowly, with a rueful smile. 

            "James," said Leiter, after a moment, "I don't think, in good conscience, we can eat anywhere else tonight. Not under the circumstances." 

            James Bond was forced to agree. Felix pulled into the car-park, and they stepped to the door of the nightclub, and then through it, into another world. 

            The club was dark, with a spotlit stage on one end. There was an old-fashioned Jazz Trio ("The Buddy Scott Trio" advertised a sign on the base drum that supported a single snare drum and a high-hat cymbal, framed on one side by an upright base and the other by a shirtsleeved singer -- presumably, Mr. Scott -- at a 1950's-vintage microphone) performing a smooth, upbeat version of Sinatra's "The Coffee Song." 

            A waiter showed them to a corner table, and there they ordered one of the finest meals James Bond had ever eaten in America. His steak was juicy and tender, the portabella mushrooms firm and tangy, the mashed potatoes expertly seasoned, and the dinner rolls fresh-baked and fragrant. Leiter's swordfish looked and smelled equally worthy, and the bartender made as fine a martini -- shaken, of course, not stirred - as James Bond had ever had. 

            Between bites, Bond picked up his narrative. 

* * *

            It was Corporal Lansing who finally gave them the key. 

            Perlin had called out for coffee at midnight, as Bond and Leiter made a survey of possible sites for Novotny's `control center.' Thus far, every installation they'd been able to find in West Berlin that possessed both satellite and computer facilities was military and allied, and all were secure. If Novotny had pentrated one, it was with the help of an insider, and there was nothing to point to any of them. 

            Lansing had arrived with the much-needed coffee in time to hear Felix grumble, as he scanned yet another list, "How many places can there be in this town with both computers and a satellite link?" 

            "Like TV stations?" asked Lansing, and Bond at Leiter looked at one another. 

            "F.A.B.!" they cried in unison. 

            Perlin looked over at them. "F.A.B.?" 

            "Fehrnsehen Aus Berlin," supplied Lansing. "It's a TV station. They're putting an addition on the building. I go by it every time I go to the music store where I get my Jazz records. Big old satellite dish on the roof." 

            Bond and Leiter smiled grimly. The construction was the key. Construction sites uniformly made a great show of security, and were uniformly poor at it, because the security aimed to keep the public away from the construction equipment and other hazards, rather than to protect the sites. There were probably half-a-dozen ways that Novotny could have snuck into the operating part of the building. 

* * *

            The hole Bond had expected in the fence was there, toward the southern end, no doubt pried there by children unable to resist the allure of heavy machinery. He and Leiter crept through and approached the building proper. Two of the doors facing the construction were gone, covered instead by thick clear plastic sheets. Bond lifted one, and gestured Leiter through it. 

            Once inside they found themselves in a darkened corridor. Bond pointed at Felix, and then to the left; to himself and to the right. Leiter nodded. 

            The plans for the new building they'd reviewed at Perlin's office had showed two possible target sites, two "control rooms," on opposite sides of the original structure. The original, still in operational use, was on one end. The new one, to which the operations were moving, was on the second floor of other. 

            Bond, his Walther PPK held comfortably in his right hand, stepped quietly down the hallway, listening at silent doors, and moving on to the stairwell at the end of the corridor. He started up the stairs, his rubber-soled shoes making no sound. This was greatly assisted by the building itself. Bond quite preferred commercial buildings when stealthy movement was required: steel and concrete stairs and floors didn't creak and squeal an alarm at one's approach. 

            He eased open the door from the second-floor landing, and made his silent way down the corridor. The flickering blue light of television or computer monitors spilled out of an open door. Bond smiled. After a day of fruitless searching, it had become easy to think of Novotny, with his mocking eyes and quirky, humorous mouth, as something of a mastermind. But the man wasn't a secret agent, he was a scientist, and the opening door with its flickering light reassured Bond. The man was an amateur. 

            Bond moved to the door and peered around the frame. The far end of the room was a bank of monitors, television and computer alike. One of the computers -- a box three feet by four -- had been pulled out of its alcove in the wall, and opened. Wires ran from it to a makeshift rack, which stood empty on the counter. In front of this stood a man with a crew cut, dressed in a common-enough light-grey business suit. He snapped shut the fasteners of a large, pigskin briefcase, and looked at his watch. 

            Bond lifted his gun, and stepped into the room. "Doctor Novotny." 

            The man turned, and Bond recognized those mocking eyes, the quirk of the mouth. "You're English," Novotny said. "I expected an American." 

            "There'll be one along soon enough," said Bond. 

            Novotny shrugged, and stepped towards him, pulling the briefcase casually from the counter. 

            Bond wasn't prepared for what happened next. Novotny's expression never hardened, never flickered, but suddenly the case was swinging in a blindingly swift underhanded blow that smashed like a sledge hammer into Bond's wrist. Pain flared like a red explosion up his arm, and the PPK flew into a dark corner of the room, as Novotny danced past him into the corridor and ran for the far end. Bond dove for his gun, but it skittered away from his reaching fingers, and under the counter. 

_No time,_ he told himself, and bolted out the door, but Novotny was too quick, Bond too many steps behind. As he reached the windows at the end Novotny spun in an odd pirouette, swinging the case around himself. It crashed against the re-enforced safety glass of the window, which sprayed out into the night in a glittering halo. However innocuous that case looked it was far heavier, and more solid, than it should be. 

            The hard drive! Bond realized it in a flash of insight as he dove for the man. But Novotny had too good of a lead, and had leaped from the window before Bond's dive brought him within reach. 

            Bond rolled to his feet, and looked out the window. Novotny had landed on the roof of the scaffolding over the rear doors, and was sprinting along it. Bond jumped from the window and landed behind him. The weight Novotny was carrying began to tell, and Bond closed on him. 

            Desperate, Novotny leaped sideways, to the metal roof over the cab of a bulldozer. He saw Bond preparing to follow and jumped again, this time onto the rear cowling of the crane. Bond landed on the bulldozer, and Novotny turned to the latticework of the crane's construction and began to climb up, scurrying like a monkey, trailing the heavy case behind him. Bond leaped to the crane, and climbed into the cabin. It was a much more modern crane than he'd seen those years ago on Crab Key, but he found it was easy enough to start the beast up, and, after he turned on every "power" lever he could find, the controls were obvious enough for turning and moving it. But there was nothing he could do, other than make sure it didn't provide Novotny an easy bridge to escape. He rotated the crane so that the boom, rather than being over the roof of the building, pointed out over the flat concrete and protruding steel rods of the new car-park like a helpful giant giving directions, the huge magnet swinging from the end like a yo-yo on the pointing finger. 

            Novotny had frozen where he was while the crane was moving, but once it stopped, he resumed his desperate climb. 

            "Novotny!" Bond yelled. "Give it up, you damned fool! You've nowhere to go." 

            But Novotny continued to climb, and, with a weary swear, Bond began to clamber up after him. The heavy case still slowed Novotny down and Bond gained steadily on him as he fled. At the top of the crane, Novotny began to make his way out along gently swaying arm. Bond followed. The wind was hardly fierce -- at ground level one would barely have noticed it -- but being atop a hundred-foot crane it felt like a gale. Bond watched Novotny sway with the weight of the case, totter for a moment, and regain his footing. He continued to scurry away from Bond, down the arm. 

            Bond followed grimly, at an advantage because he could use both hands to grip parts of the crane, and steady himself. Novotny reached the end of the arm and stopped, looking back at Bond. 

            Bond reached a hand out to him. "For God's sake, Novotny! Where are you going to go?" 

            He came closer, and Novotny swung the case at him again. Bond ducked back, and his balance shifted. Suddenly the chase was forgotten, his arms pinwheeling for balance. At the end of the arm, Novotny did the same, the case's weight having built up more inertia than he was ready for. As Bond regained his balance, Novotny lost his, and fell sidewise from the arm of the crane. Bond made an insane leap to the end of the crane, and peered over the side, expecting to see a crumpled body a hundred feet below. 

            But barely ten feet down, Novotny was clinging to the cables, shinnying down toward the six-foot disk of the magnet. Bond swore again. "Novotny!" 

            He grasped the edge of the swaying arm of the crane, and swung himself down, wrapping his legs around the cable just above Novotny's head. Novotny loosened his grip slightly and began to slide down the cable. Bond closed the distance between them. 

            Novotny's feet came to rest on the magnet's upper cover, and he grasped the cable with his right hand and swung the case as hard as he could at Bond's head. 

            Bond was only a couple of feet above the swaying disk, but it was too great a distance, too unsteady a landing, for Bond to simply let go of the cables. He tried to fend off the blow with his right arm, but only deflected it. The heavy case grazed the back of his head, and red light exploded across his vision. His left arm fell away from the cable and he felt his feet touch down on the magnet, as he overbalanced backwards. He swung his hand out desperately, snagged the cable again and clutched it with mad determination. From the corner of his eye, he saw the case swinging toward him again, and he lashed out with his free hand, past the body of the case, and toward the handle. 

            Novotny hadn't anticipated the move, and he had no time to adjust for it. Bond grabbed the handle with two fingers, and pulled with all his strength, and, at exactly that moment, floodlights sprang up from the construction yard below -- somebody, possibly Felix, had heard the commotion and tried to illuminate it -- and Novotny's body slammed into his. Both their hands loosed from the cable, and, suddenly dazzled, they careened backward into space. 

            As is so frequently the case in moments of crisis and danger, Bond saw events moving in stately slow-motion, like an instant replay of a particularly interesting turn in a ballroom dancing competition. He saw Novotny, his eyes still mocking, the floodlights reflected in their depths, open his smirking mouth to scream. He saw the sky pinwheeling beyond him, saw his own hand holding the handle of the briefcase while Novotny's slipped away. 

            Some peripheral sense made him aware that his head was rotating toward the magnet, and he desperately swung the case up against the bottom of it. There was a **_CLANG!_** and the case held against the bottom, Bond dangling from the handle. James Bond would for the rest of his life remember the elation of knowing he'd saved not only his own life, but the precious hard drive, as well. 

            Then Novotny's scream cut off suddenly, in a sound that was thump and gurgle and something else, a tearing-gristle sound of the butcher's shop. Bond couldn't look down yet. He swung his other hand up to grip the handle, and then, hanging like a circus daredevil on the world's smallest trapeze, he steeled himself, and looked for Novotny. 

            The scientist had dropped some sixty-five or seventy feet, and landed on two of the steel rods that would soon be encased in concrete at the base of a light-post. One protruded from the ruin of his neck, the other from just beside his spine. A scarlet puddle of blood was spreading beneath what had, a moment before, been a brilliant scientist. Now it was so much carrion. 

            "James!" Bond heard Felix Leiter's voice. "Hold on!" 

            "I'd no intention of doing anything else," Bond called. 

            He looked around, and saw Felix climbing into the cab of the crane. After a few false starts, the magnet began to lower slowly, gracefully, toward the ground. Bond watched Novotny's corpse rise toward him, and swung his feet around it, to gain purchase on solid ground as the magnet jerked to a halt. The grunt of the crane's engine died away. 

            Bond released the handle of the case and stepped back. "Felix!" he yelled. "You can turn the magnet off!" 

            "I already did," the Texan replied, as he clambered from the cab. He loped towards Bond. "It's going to take a team of specialists with plastic crowbars to get that thing off of there. The damned thing's a permanent electromagnet!" 

            Bond looked up at the unassuming-looking briefcase. "Well," he told Felix, "at least I saved it, even if we didn't get Novotny." 

            Felix closed his eyes and shook his head. "The hard drive's in there?" 

            Bond nodded. 

            "James, do you know how a computer hard drive stores data?" 

            "Well," said Bond, "I imagine it's rather like the way a floppy disk stores data." 

            "Which is...?" Leiter prompted. 

            "I understand it's the same principle as..." Bond's voice trailed off. "Dammit!" 

            "Yep," said Leiter, and smiled at his friend. "Same principle as magnetic tape." 

* * *

            The next few hours were a nightmare of kindly solicitousness from Leiter and Perlin, and angry recriminations from M. 

            "That information was in only two places, 007," he barked over the phone. "The hard disk, and Novotny's brain. You've destroyed both of them!" 

            "Well, sir," said Bond, "the Russians haven't got Thor either." 

            "And _that's_ your defense? 007, you've bungled this case from the moment you had it! There are two hundred and forty-nine of those damned things still circling above our heads! Sooner or later, they're bound to fall. And what then, 007? What then?" 

* * *

            "Well," said Bond, sopping up the last of his gravy with a roll, "the most painful part of it all was that he was completely right, of course." He looked across the table at Leiter. "I know I made a lot of mistakes in the whole business, but the worst of them was going up that crane after Novotny. I should have listened to what I was yelling at him: where could he go? But I'd let the chase get to me by then, and it carried me away with it. Cost Novotny his life. Cost both of our countries... Well..." Bond looked up to the ceiling, and the sky above it. 

            Leiter looked at him for a moment. "You're human, kid. There's not a one of us who hasn't fouled up something big." 

            "Hell," said Bond, "if I'd just let the case fall with Novotny, the techs could have salvaged the data. I'll never forget hanging there, smug jackass that I was, proud of how I'd _rescued_ the hard drive." He shook his head. "The only reason the Russians didn't win it all is because that first blind drop got fouled up." 

            Felix Leiter took a swig of his beer, and scowled. "I've had it with this crap!" 

            Leiter stood up at the table. "Where's the owner!" he bellowed. "I demand to see the owner!" 

            "Felix?" James Bond looked up at his friend in surprise. He'd rarely had a meal as good, anywhere in the world. What could possibly be wrong? 

            "I want the owner!" Felix bellowed again. "Bring me the owner!" 

            Bond was starting to stand when he heard the soft, deep voice speak behind him. "Is there something I can do for you, Felix?" 

            Bond turned, recognition dawning, as Leiter grinned. "Yeah," said the Texan. "You can tell my Limey friend here how you single-handedly won the Cold War!" 

            Standing behind Bond, smiling, was Corporal David J. Lansing, USMC, Retired. 

            He looked much as he had fifteen years before, large and powerful, with a gentle smile, and that sleepy, drooping eyelid. 

            "I don't know what you mean, Felix," he said, smiling. "I was a lowly border guard at Checkpoint Charlie. Most heroic thing I did over there was pick up trash." 

            Lansing's smile widened as he looked around the nightclub. On stage, the Buddy Scott Trio began a new song. Scott leaned into the microphone and crooned, "You're gonna go... Straight to the Top! You're gonna fly! You'll never stop! You're gonna win... You're gonna win!" 

            "You know," said Lansing, as he sat down at the table with them, "It's amazing what you can find in the trash. People throw out the damnedest stuff! I heard a rumor -- just a rumor, now -- that a man found a McDonalds' bag full of cash money. A million bucks. Way I heard it, the man just put it away, and finished out his hitch. Went home, paid off his folks' house, bought one of his own, started his own business. I guess a million bucks could set you up real well. A good start, at least. 'Course, for any business to work out, it takes more than seed money. Takes location, and a good product, and a lot of hard work, and some imagination." 

            Felix smiled. Bond returned the grin, and then turned back to Lansing. "Well, you certainly seem to have used plenty of both here, Corporal" 

            Lansing smiled. "Please. I'm Dave. And I thank you for the compliment. When I met Mr. Leiter in here a couple of months ago, he paid me the same one." 

            Bond looked over at Felix. 

            "All right," said Leiter. "I confess. I was working a Pinkerton job over in Clinton -- next town over. Some lunatic threatening to blow the dam. I told him that went out of style with tying widows to railroad tracks, and turned him over to the cops." 

            Bond smiled. "I can just imagine what you thought when you saw this place." 

            He turned back to Lansing. "But what about that story you were telling? Didn't that fellow think he ought to give the money back to its rightful owner?" 

            Lansing shook his head. "Oh, I don't think so," he said. "If he'd worked at Charlie as long as I had, he'd've known that it's a full-time hangout for all manner of spies and smugglers and crooks. `Rightful Owner' was like as not some traitor, or somebody trying to bribe one. Maybe a drug dealer. I imagine that fellow thought the money was better off where it ended up. People who leave that kind of money lying around... It'd be like an international Super-Power leaving some top-secret weapon in orbit, waiting for some high-tech company over there on 495 -- like the place where my wife works -- to learn how to take control of it and use it to help the Kefiristanis seal off all those derelict nuclear missile siloes." 

            Lansing clapped a hand on Bond's shoulder. "And after all," he laughed, "Every small child knows the rule: Finders, keepers!"


End file.
